The Nation Magazine Relaunches With OpenPublish
NEW YORK, May 4 -- The Nation, one of America's leading political magazines and a growing source for news and opinion online, re-launched its website today with a new design and with OpenPublish, an innovative, open-source platform that strengthens the magazine's unique business model. The redesign gives The Nation one of the most technically advanced websites in the industry, and offers those who care passionately about politics and investigative reporting a robust new platform for news and political activism.
The redesign is the culmination of an effort to position the country's oldest weekly magazine as a thought leader online. The redesign features strategic product innovations like search-engine friendly "topic" pages, story-level twitter feeds and instantly-customizable homepage and section front designs. This allows Nation editors to respond more quickly to breaking news, and build cross-platform packages around major investigative reporting. This same technology provides The Nation's business staff the flexibility to quickly configure customizable, innovative campaigns for advertisers and marketers.
The project was led by the strategic digital consultancy The Osder Group, whose recent projects include ProPublica.org, The Daily Beast and TakePart.com. The platform, OpenPublish, was developed by Phase2 Technology, and utilizes the power of Thomson Reuters Open Calais semantic metatagging engine.
"We've moved aggressively to embrace new technology and to extend our unique brand of journalism," said Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher of The Nation. "This is a nimble, lively new site that gives us the ability to compete online, but also strengthens the heart of our work - investigative reporting, political analysis and online opinion."
The Nation is launching two new blogs: Media Fix, a running commentary on media and politics from former Editor & Publisher Editor Greg Mitchell; and a blog for Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater. The redesign also includes a robust multimedia section with slideshows, videos and podcasts; a new community section; and targeted verticals for audiences including students, educators and "Nation Associate" supporters.
The community section will aggregate content like reader comments, letters, polls and sharing tools, and this summer The Nation will introduce a feature where site users can initiate their own activism campaigns online. The redesign also expands and highlights sharing tools to the growing number of online social networks, which now drive more than 30% of The Nation's traffic.
The site is a powerful tool to support The Nation's pioneering business model, which draws on four distinct funding streams - ads, subscriptions, special events and the Nation Associates program, which grew significantly in 2009 in spite of the recession. The redesign advances all four: it creates new ad positions; showcases multimedia from Nation events; enhances subscriber-only content; and includes a special section and unique features exclusively for supporters.
"Other news organizations are discovering something we've been doing for years – a diversified business model that draws on the loyalty and deep engagement of readers and donors as well as ad dollars to survive," said Teresa Stack, President of The Nation. "We're creating a digital platform that should expand traffic and revenue, but more importantly get our readers more in touch with the magazine, and brings our robust off-line community into the digital age."
